Years ago, standards processes were as much about screwing your competition as it was about cooperation. Take the telephone protocol standards. They are open, but the idea was always to rush an implementation that was different from your competition, push through that implementation in the standards committee and then force your competition to rewrite their code. The early days of web "standards" went that way as well (as I'm sure many people will remember).
However, the other thing to keep in mind is that proprietary solutions designed to force customers into vendor lock-in has always been the dominant situation. In fact, things are dramatically better than they were ages ago.
Things like TCP/IP were not the solutions that the big vendors wanted. They wanted their walled gardens (and worked hard to produce them). Even HTTP and the web only became popular because of NCSA Mosaic, which was proprietary software. It's also interesting to see the list of original licencees [1] The only company that currently exists is Fujitsu. Netscape Navigator was written by many of the same authors as Mosaic and they only decided to open source it in 1998 -- a move that literally shocked the development world. This eventually led to Mozilla.
Back in the day, people "in the know" knew about free software, the FSF, Emacs, Vi/Vim, Posix, etc, etc. The average programmer knew nothing about it, except for being forced to learn vi in university perhaps. These days, you can't swing a cat without hitting someone who is passionate about at least open source, even if they don't necessarily quite understand software freedom.
I don't think we are in a worse position than we used to be. Granted, there are more and more users (billions now) that don't know anything about free and open systems. 30 or 40 years ago, those people were similarly ignorant, but weren't using computers. So when your aunt Martha is hooked up to Facebook, it seems like we've lost (or at least are loosing). But these open platforms and protocols have always been niche and our niche is much bigger than it was before. While you may never be able to chat with your aunt Martha with a free and open system run by people who are more interested in providing a service than somehow extracting money from you, you can chat with a lot more people than you ever could before. I think the key thing to remember is that you've never been able to chat with your aunt Martha using that free and open system.
I think it is perfectly acceptable (and probably even preferable) to turn inward and mostly ignore what's happening in the proprietary world. I think it's probably a good idea, at least for now, to ignore fashion and popularity and instead concentrate on building free and open applications that work the way you want. There are more than enough people around with the same ideals to make it work.
If you build it, they might not come, but if you don't build it, they definitely will not come.